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Tag: China Digital Summit
Posted inNews

Music NFTs: ‘It’s fandom, community, flexing, and sharing’

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

Fanaply was one of the first startups to explore the potential of digital collectibles based on music artists, more than a year before the acronym ‘NFT’ was on the music industry’s radar.

In 2019, the company teamed up with the Coachella music festival on a giveaway that saw more than 60,000 people take part. It has since worked with a range of partners, including Ticketmaster, Niall Horan and 5 Seconds of Summer.

In his appearance at the Music Ally China Digital Summit this week, CEO Grant Dexter explained how Fanaply had seen these projects as providing fans with a proof of fandom, or “proof of flex” as he put it.

“Was I one of the first thousand people in at this virtual show? Was I one of the first hundred people to listen to this new single?” he said.

“Those were incredible programs. I think we did something like 30,000 or 40,000 with Niall Horan. I think we went through 15,000 to 20,000 of them with 5 Seconds of Summer. And it was a real proof of concept rolling into 2021.”

Posted inNews

MQA founder talks music quality, streaming and immersive audio

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

As the founder of music technology firm MQA – and before that of Meridian Audio – Bob Stuart has plenty of views on audio quality and the evolution of music services.

This week, he shared them in a keynote interview at the Music Ally China Digital Summit, for which he was interviewed by Vickie Nauman, founder and CEO of CrossBorderWorks. Stuart started by looking back to the early days of digital music.

“My work began in the analog era, before digital existed, and when digital came obviously we were very interested in it, because digital has a promise that we can store the music without damage, and we can transmit it easily without damage,” he said.

“Those are real benefits, but even at the beginning of digital people were arguing about the sound quality. Was it as good as analog, you know?”

Stuart cited the transition from vinyl to CD as a “hugely important” moment for the music industry because – and vinyl lovers may want to look away at this point – “it brought a very clear sound, a better sound, and a more robust form of distribution to everybody”.

However, he also looked back to the period around 2000 when he and his peers were exploring a next step “from CD to high resolution” only for technology to take another course.

Posted inNews

Collabs, socials and more: international marketing for Chinese artists

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

The inaugural Music Ally China Digital Summit is taking place this week, and a panel session today focused on international marketing, with a particular focus on Chinese artists.

“Outside of China, the main Chinese music markets are Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao,” said Keith Tan, director, market development, APAC at CD Baby.

“But I think that the digital side of things has allowed Chinese music artists specifically to also play in a lot of the big cities like London, Sydney, San Francisco, Vancouver, this kind of thing. If you backtrack it to maybe even 10 to 15 years ago, I don’t think Chinese artists – or not that many – were touring to those markets.”

Posted inNews

Blokur boss talks music data and startup challenges

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Blokur CEO Phil Barry has been talking about the startup’s evolution, in an appearance at the Music Ally China Digital Summit this morning.

The company now processes data for around 70m songs from “trillions of streaming interactions” for its major and independent music clients, as well as for digital music services.

“We’ve created all these brilliant ways of distributing content around the world, but we haven’t seen the same revolution in the way that the value comes back to the creator,” he said. “Blokur is trying to fill that gap.”

The company has built its database of music rights, and a system for matching usage of music on digital services to the underlying compositions.

Posted inNews

Fuga boss sees bright future in local DSPs and blockchain technology

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Fuga boss Pieter van Rijn has been outlining where he sees future revenue growth coming from, in his speech at the Music Ally China Digital Summit.

“The continuous rise of UGC and social platforms in combination with the emergence of significant locational DSPs in, for instance, Asia and Latin America is really important and it will continue to unlock growth and value for existing and future content,” he said, before predicting that the music industry’s data analysis capabilities will enable it to be “more predictive and more prescriptive”.

Van Rijn also cited blockchain technology as encouraging. “The word that at some point was very popular, then became a bit of a swear word, and is now back on the table again,” as he put it.